Scala 2.10 Milestone 2 arrives

With anticipation reaching new levels, the Scala team release a further milestone to allow keen Scala fans to test out some of the new features before the main release

Scala’s charm offensive this year may have irked some, but the
fact is that it is becoming one of the most talked about languages
in its own right – acquiring new fans and ‘haters’ in equal
measure. We’re on the side of the former thinking that whilst it
may not be accessible at first to newcomers, by giving it enough
time its benefits shine through.

The plans laid out by the Scala team in 2012 show how much there
is to be done to gain acceptance. With focus
mostly on next month’s first milestone of the next
IDE, Helium, we’re glad to see the language itself is
progressing too with the appearance of Scala 2.10.0 Milestone 2,
bringing in a fair few features and improvements such as:

Support for implementing a parallel collection using a
concurrent collection. You should now be able to implement a
combiner using a concurrent (thread-safe) collection

Ctries added to the standard library. Implement parallel ctries
using the above mechanism

Execution contexts on parallel collections, to enable
customizing a thread pool, number of threads

New futures and promises library added to scala.concurrent
(joint work with the Akka team)

Numerous improvements to reification

Virtual pattern matcher improvements

A significantly faster optimizer

Improvements to RedBlack tree

Fixes to specialization (AnyRef, interaction of final and
@inline)

This version isn’t intended to be used in a production
environment, but merely to offer a glimpse into what Scala 2.10 can
do, showcasing why so many people are shifting over to it. Watch
this space for Milestone 3.